Mr. Engdahl may be the most unpopular man among Americans today, but seriously do readers across the world care? It’s a different point of view that the lords of the Nobel don’t care about the humble reader tucked in his/her corner of the globe. If they did, they would know that prizes don’t make writers immortal; the writing does.
The Nobel prize did not create Rabindranath Tagore, nor did it enhance his status; actually the reverse is probably more true! Americans need not bother with what a prize committee member thought or said. Generations of readers spread across the continents have grown up enriching their minds and hearts on American literature – the works of writers and poets (in random order) like Jack London, Earnest Hemingway, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lee Harper, Allen Ginsberg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest J. Gaines, Pearl Buck, Truman Capote, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, JD Salinger, Washington Irving … the list is too long to continue. Many among the American greats were born and wrote before the creation of the Nobel. So did the accident of their birth detract from the power of their writing? As for those American writers who did receive the Nobel prize – John Steinbeck in 1962, Hemingway in 1954, Pearl Buck in 1938, Toni Morrison in 1994 – I certainly don’t revere them because of the Nobel. In fact when I first started reading the first three American Nobel Laureates, I was really too young to care. Some of the greatest lessons of humanity that I learned, were from the words penned by London, Hemingway, Stowe, Buck, among others and also Ernest J Gaines – I mention him last because I read Gaines for the first time a mere seven years ago.
As a reader I do admit to having picked up books after learning that they were written by Nobel Laureates, like Nadine Gordimer for instance, and have become a fan thereafter. But I have also puzzled over the reasons for choosing William Golding, whose Lord of Flies I read as a school girl and didn’t think much of other than being an enjoyable read. I haven’t bothered to read Harold Pinter, and I don’t think I ever shall. There are other obscure names in the Nobel’s list. It is very possible that sales of their books went up soon after the prize. But how many mothers and fathers will urge their children to read those Nobel Laureates is any body’s guess. On the other hand those writers whose works have moved me will be passed down, as many of them already have, to my children and to theirs after them, Nobel or no Nobel.
Tags: Literature Prizes, Nobel Prize
